George Lefebvre, 80, has a regular if unconventional winter workout routine: lugging logs from the shed to his basement, where his wood-burning furnace is. “It helps keep me tuned up,” says the mayor of Latchford, a town of about 200 people in northeastern Ontario.
Physical benefits aside, it’s a burden he’d rather not deal with at his age. “It’s a very onerous process,” he says, explaining that he orders truckloads of wood and has his son chop up lumber chords when they arrive. Yet it’s a familiar hassle for Latchford residents. The TransCanada pipeline passes through the town, but Latchford does not have access to natural gas, although it’s lobbied both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments. So residents who can’t afford — or don’t want to pay for — surging electricity prices for heating are left to find alternatives: wood or propane, mainly.